Thursday, June 13, 2013

GE13: What happened? And what now? (Part 1) ― Clive Kessler

GE13: What happened? And what now? (Part 1) ― Clive Kessler

June 12, 2013

Malaysian Insider-- Side Views

JUNE 12 ― In a brief commentary elsewhere (“Malaysia’s election
result — no surprise to the knowledgeable,” Asian Currents, June 2013),
I have noted one paradoxical but hugely important consequence of
Malaysia’s recent national elections held on 5 May.

A paradox: anomalous domination

The remarkable, perhaps “counter-intuitive”, fact is that, while the
election result itself ― namely, a fairly close but nonetheless
comfortable victory of the Umno-centred Barisan Nasional side over the
Pakatan Rakyat opposition ― came as no great surprise, that unremarkable
result nonetheless had one quite surprising, even paradoxical,
consequence.

From GE13 an electorally weakened Umno emerged politically even more
dominant than it had been before. While still embattled in the broader
political arena, Umno was delivered a dominant position within the
parliament, ruling coalition and government.
By bestowing it with that now dominant parliamentary position, GE13
had delivered into Umno’s hands an ascendancy over the governing BN
coalition, government policy, Parliament’s agenda and parliamentary
process, and thereby over national political life ― over the nation’s
affairs and direction ― of a quite unprecedented and perhaps
irresistible kind.
What are the relevant facts here?
The immediate challenge facing Najib Razak, it had been said in the
run-up to GE13, was at best to win back the two-thirds majority (or 148
of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat), or at least to improve on the
2008 yield of 140.
More modest and realistic than demanding recovery of the two-thirds
majority, some suggested that even 145 would have been a “good result”,
good enough to ensure his immediate political survival against critics,
adversaries and doubters in his own camp.
In the event, worse even than at GE12 in 2008, Umno/BN won only 133
seats. For those who might be satisfied with nothing less than assured
domination ― a constitutionally unassailable and impregnable position ― a
shortfall of eight seats had now almost doubled to 15.

Yet ― as I noted in my summary review ― behind all its archaizing
ceremonialism and cultural nostalgia, politics and political thinking
within Umno is nothing other than Realpolitik of the most ruthlessly
pragmatic kind. And realistically, Umno (if its interests, and nothing
else, are to be the focus of analysis, as the party “hard men” insist)
did not do at all badly.

Why?

Because, paradoxically, its political domination was enhanced, not
diminished, by the election result ― despite the further decline in the
government’s parliamentary numbers and the opposition’s advances.
Drawing a contrast between the post-election situation of Umno/BN and its Pakatan Rakyat (PKR) adversary is instructive here.

The PKR coalition won a total of 89 seats. The opposition coalition’s
parliamentary numbers are reasonably balanced. All three of its
constituent parties have a sizeable and, if not an equal then a
comparable, presence in the Dewan Rakyat (DAP holds 38 seats, PKR 30,
PAS 21). The smallest of the three, PAS, contributes about a quarter of
the opposition’s parliamentary numbers, while the largest, DAP, more
than two-fifths but less than a half.

Contrast that with the situation on the government side.

Of BN’s 133 seats, Umno now holds 88 (up from 79 in 2008). Its MPs
amount to two-thirds of the total BN parliamentary representation.

Umno alone has a parliamentary presence that is virtually the same as
that of the combined opposition. Its shortfall of a single seat, if
that troubles anybody who matters, is one that might be readily reversed
through a by-election victory, the timely defection of an “unhappy”
opposition MP, or even a successful appeal against the result in, say,
Bachok or some other constituency where the Umno candidate had fallen
narrowly short of victory in the election night count.

Now compare Umno’s situation among its governing BN partners with the
more balanced situation in the opposition coalition’s parliamentary
numbers.

After Umno, the next largest party on that side of the house holds
only 14 seats. The Umno’s customary “primary partners” going back to
Alliance Party times even preceding independence, the Chinese MCA and
the Indian MIC, now together hold only 11 (7 and 4 respectively) and its
newer ally Gerakan, 1 ― the decline in their public plausibility and
electoral viability coming as the result of, and signifying, the
increasing Umno dominance over its old BN partners in deciding national
policy over the last decade.

After GE13, more even than before, the Umno’s ability to head a
government, and rule over the nation’s core in peninsular Malaysia, now
rests disproportionately upon the seats that its fractious East
Malaysian partners hold in Sarawak and Sabah (34 seats, together held by
8 different parties, many of them loose, unstable personal alliances of
mercurial, opportunistic and “gymnastic” leaders.)

Umno’s task will be to satisfy, appease and manage its increasingly
assertive, and at times even restive, East Malaysian partners who now so
heavily underwrite BN’s, and hence Umno’s, ability to rule.
But provided it can do that, in numerical and political terms Umno
now dominates ― perhaps as never before ― the national government.

Provided it can decide without internal strife what it wants to do,
provided it “knows its own mind”, it will be in a powerful position in
the years ahead to have its way on all significant political and policy
issues, so long as its Sabah and Sarawak allies can be kept “in line”.

In national government, an era of unprecedented Umno domination may now be in the offing.

Umno’s oddly empowering victory
Some indication of the nature and sources of the Umno’s success ― of
how it stands to grow greatly in effective power from its diminished
parliamentary base ― is suggested by the relative size of the three
components within the opposition’s parliamentary delegation.

The Pakatan delegation is reasonably balanced, but not entirely so.
It displays one anomalous feature. What is in many ways the most
substantial member of the opposition coalition, the Islamic Party PAS,
has the smallest parliamentary representation.

This is because, in Malaysia’s imbalanced and “malapportioned”
electoral system, PAS unlike its coalition partners competes directly
against Umno for “bulk” Malay votes: that is, for support from the core,
more traditionally-minded and less cosmopolitan Malay voters in the
rural Malay heartlands. They are direct rivals for the support of the
core part of the nation’s Malay political core component, the core of
the core.

Those rural Malay areas are hugely favoured in the drawing of
electoral boundaries ― which is to say in their size, meaning the
smaller number of votes that is necessary for them to elect an MP. It is
in those parts of the country, in those electorates, that Malay
domination of national political life is grounded.

And, of the opposition parties, only PAS competes directly against Umno for those votes.
Their struggle is a “zero-sum game”. It is an “up and down” thing, a
constant long-term oscillation. When Umno does badly, PAS numbers
increase and PAS political influence grows (and vice versa).

That has always been the basis of PAS’s political strength and
long-term strategy. By its ability to win popular Malay support, and so
to deprive Umno of the credibility and legitimacy that substantial Malay
support ensures, PAS can at times exercise enormous influence over
Umno, over its policies and direction, from outside.

But when Umno does well, PAS numbers and its immediate influence upon
Umno thinking are diminished. When Umno does well electorally, it
denies PAS this important leverage. PAS’s ability to force itself upon
its rival’s thinking in the setting of national priorities and direction
― even to set terms that Umno cannot resist ― declines.

When it succeeds in this way in freeing itself to some degree from
the constraints imposed by PAS ― from the strategic stranglehold that in
its “good years” results from PAS’s political success and ensuing Malay
“moral credibility” ― Umno wins for itself some significantly increased
political “room for manoeuvre”.
That is what happened at the recent GE13. The question to ask is why? How was it done?

The winning campaign
The key to the election result, and to Umno’s improbable feat of
drawing increased political strength from reduced parliamentary numbers
and a weakened parliamentary position, was Umno’s success in its head-on
clash with PAS for Malay votes in the Malay heartlands ― for the “core
Malay vote”.

Much has been made of the fact that the two members of the Malay
ethno-supremacist pressure group Perkasa whom Umno directly or
indirectly endorsed ― Zulkifli Noordin in the Klang Valley “beltway”
seat of Sham Alam and Ibrahim Ali in PAS “crown jewels” seat of Pasir
Mas ― lost to their adversaries. There was no comfort for Umno in those
two results.

This has prompted some commentators to suggest that the GE13 results
signal a clear repudiation by the national electorate as a whole, Malay
as well as non-Malay, of Perkasa, its approach and what it stands for.
But the matter is not so simple or clear.

The nature of the winning campaign has to be more closely considered.
(i) The international level

The government’s GE13 campaign operated at several levels. For
international consumption, notably the foreign investment and diplomatic
communities, one story was developed.

This was the beguiling story of Prime Minister Najib as the heroic
but still shackled economic reformer, the eager and available driver of
administrative transformation ― and also of taxation reform, in the form
of reduced corporate and personal taxation, all to be made good by the
reasonably prompt post-election introduction of a goods and services tax
(GST).

Glued onto this portrait was another. This was the picture of Najib
as the self-proclaimed, and internationally acclaimed, “global
moderate”, the champion of interfaith conciliation and the determined
enemy of all forms of political extremism, but especially that driven by
religious militants and fanatics.

This “international campaign” projecting Najib as a soon to be
unbound economic Prometheus and also a fastidious moderate who would
“have no truck” with any crude, populist extremism was offered with a
clear objective.

Its purpose was to win for the prime minister and his party a
sympathetic hearing overseas and, with it, the indulgence of a free hand
at home to wage the other parts of their multilevel campaign.

Overseas, that portrait of Najib was reassuring, and people there
would be satisfied with it. Nothing more to be asked for. Its
plausibility had simply to be upheld. For example, against the
free-lance meddling of a rogue Australian senator.
(ii) The domestic pantomime
While this “image campaign” was offered internationally, the Najib
who was seen for months on the campaign trail at home was something
different. At home the prime minister cut a benign and ever-avuncular
figure as he campaigned up and down the country by recourse to a kind of
“Santa Claus politics” (as some called it). Its simplicity was that of a
holiday pantomime. Or perhaps a travelling circus: “Every few minutes
something new, something different, something dramatic! Something for
everybody!”

There was something, something new, for somebody every day, a new
inducement or “softener” for yet another interest group or finely drawn
demographic category.

This was a campaign to the nation’s socially disaggregated parts, to
its separate disarticulated elements, not to the nation as a whole.

It was not a campaign that projected any distinctive concept that the
prime minister may have had, and wished to promote, of the Malaysian
nation and its evolving destiny.

It was instead a campaign directed to every individual voter and
every special interest-group or social element. It was one that
encouraged them all to ask “What is in this for me? For us?” ― and which
then provided an answer. Concretely and immediately, tangibly. An
answer not in words or ideas but in palpable material benefits and ―
“just for you and people like you, in your same situation or
predicament” ― specified provisions.

Prime Minister Najib offered vast menu of hand-outs and rewards ― at
prospectively huge cost to public expenditure, to the national accounts
and the government’s coffers ― in the hope of attaching ever more
securely to himself his own side’s loyal political followers, and of
attracting the undecided to join them in supporting him and his cause.

This was hardly the kind of campaign that international investors,
eager to see clear evidence of some sort of advance pre-election
commitment to fiscal austerity and economic responsibility, can have
been hoping to see Umno run. Not what they had in mind!

But, though it involved huge public expenditures and costly promises,
those promises had been accompanied by assurances of reduced corporate
tax levels. So, overall, it may have pleased those foreign bystanders
anyway: as a strategy that would make prompt Malaysian adoption of a GST
to pay for it all inevitable.
It may have appealed to them as a neat way to make the fickle,
imprudent and gullible people pay for all the offered benefits and
promises that they had so unwisely and unaffordably chosen to accept.
(Significantly, mention of the impending introduction of a GST was no
part of the election campaign, neither Umno/BN’s nor the opposition’s.)

So allied to Najib “the great transformer in waiting” and Najib the
global moderate was Najib “the great dispenser of treats and
inducements” ― who was also, or so it was hoped by some, “the canny,
crafty promoter of a GST”, the masterful maker of traps and ambushes who
was making the GST’s introduction necessary and laying the grounds for
its general acceptance.

“Of course we may all have these benefits. We Malaysians are entitled
to nothing less. But we Malaysians too ― who else? ― must pay for them.
In doing so we will not only reward ourselves and ensure our
government’s fiscal viability from which every citizen benefits. We can
make Malaysia, more even than before, the up-to-date model of a
developing nation and the envy of the entire postcolonial world”. It is
not hard to script the arguments that will need to be made and
invoked.

(iii) The real campaign
Umno/BN’s was a multi-level campaign.
The first level projected Najib’s image internationally as an
economic reformer and religious moderate. Here he was portrayed as an
intelligent and polished progressive in a land where progressives were
not conspicuously plentiful in official circles.

This second campaign, in many ways a media construct or artefact, was
largely a diversion and a distraction. It was devised to create a
plausible appearance of dynamism and momentum to what had become, among
the world’s notable political parties, an ungainly, lumbering and
sclerotic dinosaur. It was staged to divert unwelcome attention from the
real campaign.

It was, of course, those two “show campaigns” that occupied and
entirely seized the attention of the international media. Meanwhile, the
real campaign was conducted with unremitting determination, even
ruthlessness, beneath the “foreign radar”, out of view of most overseas
reporters and commentators.What was the “real” campaign?

The nature of Umno/BN election strategy was clear. Like all
intelligent political analysts, those in the party’s “brains trust” and
campaign “engine room” could see that the vast bulk of Chinese voters
were lost to BN and were unlikely to be won back, no matter what the old
ruling party bloc did or promised.

Much of the Indian vote too was lost, but not all of it was entirely
beyond recall. Part of it might be won back with some dramatic gestures
(most remarkable of which was the Hindraf rapprochement). But while
winning back that partial Indian support might do Umno/BN’s political
image some much needed good by providing some symbolic rehabilitation
for its claims of intercultural accommodation, those Indian votes that
might be won over would never be enough to secure an Umno/BN victory.

So the strategy of the real campaign was focused elsewhere.
It was a battle for Malay votes.

Umno/BN saw, as some who were not part of its campaign also
understood, that the key to the election was Malay votes. In comparison,
nothing else really mattered much at all.

The key question was whether Umno/BN, and especially Umno itself,
could win enough peninsular Malay votes, and enough of them in the right
places ― meaning in the right local constituencies ― for Umno, in
association with its Sarawak and Sabah allies, to secure a clear
parliamentary majority.

It was conducted in Malay terms and directed to a Malay audience.
Meaning, the campaign was projected above all in the daily
Malay-language press, notably the Umno’s own Utusan Malaysia, and via
the Malay-language programming of the television channels with the
greatest Malay reach, principally TV3 and RTM.
It was a campaign conducted for the votes of Malays, mainly for those
of the great bulk of the more “traditionally-minded” Malays, in the
Malay rural heartland areas.

The Umno campaign was simple: “all is at risk!” There is no
protection, it kept hammering away, for you and your family, for all
Malays, for the Malay stake in the country, for Islam or for the Malay
rulers who are the ultimate bastion of our Malay-Islamic identity and
national primacy ― other than us here in Umno.

It was a campaign that appealed to their sense of themselves ― to
their sense of Malay identity and of Malay centrality to national life.
It was a campaign that sought to suggest how tenuous the basis of Malay
identity had now become in national life, how insecure the Malay grip
upon the Malay stake in the nation had become. Everything that was
distinctively Malay about Malaysia, it was suggested, was now under
threat.
It was a campaign that both cultivated and then also appealed to a
Malay sense of political and cultural peril, even crisis. It was a
campaign that consisted of a managed panic: that the Malays were now
beleaguered in their own land, the Tanah Melayu. Their historic stake in
the nation was being whittled away and was now in jeopardy.

It was a campaign that sought to suggest that, as political currents
were now running, it was not fanciful but realistic to imagine that
Malays might one day soon “hilang di dunia” (in the words of the
classical formulation), that they might disappear from the face of the
earth.

It was a campaign of controlled communal panic. Malays and their way
of life are beleaguered, and, central to their way of life, Islam was in
jeopardy. Malay historical primacy and political leadership, the
religious ascendancy of Islam, and the constitutional position of the
Malay state rulers as their “untrumpable” guarantors had become the
sacred trinity of the Umno campaign.

Everything that mattered to the Malay majority and its conventional
loyalties was now at risk, it was suggested. It was threatened by the
opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition ― of which of course, the Islamic
Party PAS was a key component. In the division of political labour
between the Pakatan partners, it fell to PAS to wage the direct contest
against Umno for votes in the nation’s Malay heartlands core.
So, above all else, the national election ― an election that would
decide the prime minister’s and his party’s future ― turned upon a
contest for “the national Malay soul” between Umno and PAS.
That was the real campaign.

It was the campaign that won the election for Umno/BN.

And it was a campaign that the many overseas reporters and
commentators who flocked to Kuala Lumpur for a week or two simply did
not see or “read” or understand.

It went beneath their radar, it was beyond their social, professional
and imaginative reach. It was outside their range of cultural
accessibility ― and also that, to be fair to them, of the vast majority
of “like-minded” and “sympathetic” young urban Malaysians whom they were
delighted to meet: who captured their attention, won their sympathy,
and shaped their view of Malaysian society and politics.

But, to those who were running the “real” campaign, that inattention
was no problem. On the contrary. Let the foreign press write the stories
that might please them, that seemed to centre upon the overseas
journalists’ own effete concerns, not those of the rural Malay voters.
Let them chase after stories that led them away from the real story, the
main action.

After all, the “real campaign” for Malay votes in the heartlands ―
for a firm place within and a hold upon the Malay soul ― would prosper
best if it went unrecognized and unreported by the meddling and
opinionated visitors of the international press. Let them meddle instead
where their own interests and sympathies were engaged, not where their
intruding curiosity might prove inconvenient, even embarrassing.
(To be continued in Part 2). — New Mandala

* Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.